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More by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cradle is one of this century's most important works...and Vonnegut at his very best.

Kurt Vonnegut One of the greatest minds in American writing, Kurt Vonnegut has left an indelible impression on literature with such inventive novels as
Cat's Cradle,
Slaughterhouse-Five and
Breakfast of Champions. Now this iconic figure shares his often hilarious and always insightful reflections on America, art, politics and life in general. No matter the subject, Vonnegut will have you considering perspectives you may never have regarded. On the creative process: "If you want to really hurt your parents...the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding." On politics: "No, I am not going to run for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb." On nature: "Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes." On modern cultural attitudes: "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals." And on the fate of humankind: "The good Earth, we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."
A Man Without a Country showcases Vonnegut at his wittiest, most acerbic, and most concerned. Beyond the humor and biting satire is an appeal to all readers to give careful thought to the world around them and the people they share it with.

Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW who has, in the later stage of his life, become "unstuck in time" and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously.

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence). The "unstuck" nature of Pilgrim's experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder; then again, Pilgrim's aliens may be as "real" as Dresden is real to him.

Struggling to find some purpose, order, or meaning to his existence and humanity's, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack (certainly the author's best character name), has a child with her, and drifts on some supernal plane, finally, in which Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, Montana Wildhack, and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but rather disperse through all planes of existence.

Slaughterhouse-Five was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a best seller, and remains four decades later as timeless and shattering a war fiction as Catch-22, with which it stands as the two signal novels of their riotous and furious decade.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut is a master of contemporary American Literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America's attention in
The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as a "true artist" (
The New York Times) with
Cat's Cradle in 1963. He is, as Graham Greene has declared, "one of the best living American writers".
Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.

Kurt Vonnegut The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there's a catch to the invitation and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself reads from his most celebrated works:
Breakfast of Champions,
Cat's Cradle,
Slaughterhouse-Five, and three complete stories from
Welcome to the Monkey House.

Kurt Vonnegut Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut's career as a writer, he has sat down many times with radio host and interviewer Walter James Miller to conduct in-depth discussions of his work and the world. Now the best of these interviews have been collected in an audiobook for the first time. This is the perfect audio collection for the Vonnegut fan who wants to understand the writer as he was, is, and will be.

Philip K. Dick, Robert Silverberg, Fritz Leiber, Marion Zimmer Bradley & Kurt Vonnegut This first volume of
Favorite Science Fiction Stories features "the best of the best" from the Golden Age of science fiction. It includes 21 stories by, among others, Andre Norton, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Robert Silverberg, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Philip K. Dick, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson , Alan Edward Nourse, Fritz Leiber, Frederik Pohl, Fredric Brown, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and others. This is a must listen for sci-fi buffs and anyone who likes a well written and imaginative story.

Kurt Vonnegut Audie Award Finalist, Best Male Narrator, 2016

Breakfast of Champions (1973) provides frantic, scattershot satire and a collage of Vonnegut's obsessions. His recurring cast of characters and American landscape was perhaps the most controversial of his canon; it was felt by many at the time to be a disappointing successor to Slaughterhouse-Five, which had made Vonnegut's literary reputation.

The core of the novel is Kilgore Trout, a familiar character very deliberately modeled on the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985), a fact that Vonnegut conceded frequently in interviews and that was based upon his own occasional relationship with Sturgeon. Here Kilgore Trout is an itinerant wandering from one science fiction convention to another; he intersects with the protagonist, Dwayne Hoover (one of Vonnegut's typically boosterish, lost, and stupid mid-American characters), and their intersection is the excuse for the evocation of many others, familiar and unfamiliar, dredged from Vonnegut's gallery. The central issue is concerned with intersecting and apposite views of reality, and much of the narrative is filtered through Trout, who is neither certifiably insane nor a visionary writer but can pass for either depending upon Dwayne Hoover's (and Vonnegut's) view of the situation.

America, when this novel was published, was in the throes of Nixon, Watergate, and the unraveling of our intervention in Vietnam; the nation was beginning to fragment ideologically and geographically, and Vonnegut sought to cram all of this dysfunction (and a goofy, desperate kind of hope, the irrational comfort given through the genre of science fiction) into a sprawling narrative whose sense, if any, is situational, not conceptual. Reviews were polarized; the novel was celebrated for its bizarre aspects and became the basis of a Bruce Willis movie adaptation whose reviews were not nearly so polarized. (Most critics hated it.)

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut's first novel spins the chilling tale of engineer Paul Proteus, who must find a way to live in a world dominated by a supercomputer and run completely by machines. Paul's rebellion is vintage Vonnegut – wildly funny, deadly serious, and terrifyingly close to reality.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

Kurt Vonnegut Master storyteller and satirist Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most in-demand commencement speakers of his time. For each occasion, Vonnegut’s words were unfailingly unique, insightful, and witty, and they stayed with audience members long after graduation.

As edited by Dan Wakefield, this book reads like a narrative in the unique voice that made Vonnegut a hero to readers and listeners of all ages. At times hilarious, razor-sharp, freewheeling, and deeply serious, these reflections are ideal for anyone undergoing what Vonnegut would call their "long-delayed puberty ceremony" - marking the passage from student to full-time adult.

This book makes the perfect gift for high school or college graduates - or for parents and grandparents who remember Vonnegut fondly and want to connect with him in a new context.

Kurt Vonnegut Galapagos takes the listener back one million years to AD 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galapagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, totally different human race.

Kurt Vonnegut, America's master satirist, looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry - and all that is worth saving.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

Kurt Vonnegut American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Kurt Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of grey with a verdict that will haunt us all. Mother Night is a daring challenge to our moral sense.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

Kurt Vonnegut Eliot Rosewater, a drunk volunteer fireman and president of the fabulously rich Rosewater Foundation, is about to attempt a noble experiment with human nature, with a little help from writer Kilgore Trout. The result is Kurt Vonnegut's funniest satire, an etched-in-acid portrayal of the greed, hypocrisy, and follies of the flesh we are all heir to.

As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Kurt Vonnegut's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Gay Talese about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was known for blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, and that is exactly what he does in this little gem of of a story from 1962. In the chronology of his works, it came between
Mother Night and
Cat's Cradle. The title is pronounced "2 B R naught 2 B" and references the famous phrase, 'To be or not to be" in Shakespeare's
Hamlet.
The story takes place in a future when diseases and aging have been eliminated and, as a result, the government has taken measures to insure population control.

Kurt Vonnegut One of the greatest minds in American writing, Kurt Vonnegut has left an indelible impression on literature with such inventive novels as Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. Now this iconic figure shares his often hilarious and always insightful reflections on America, art, politics and life in general. No matter the subject, Vonnegut will have you considering perspectives you may never have regarded. On the creative process: "If you want to really hurt your parents...the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding." On politics: "No, I am not going to run for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb." On nature: "Evolution is so creative. That's how we got giraffes." On modern cultural attitudes: "Do you think Arabs are dumb? They gave us our numbers. Try doing long division with Roman numerals." And on the fate of humankind: "The good Earth, we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy." A Man Without a Country showcases Vonnegut at his wittiest, most acerbic, and most concerned. Beyond the humor and biting satire is an appeal to all readers to give careful thought to the world around them and the people they share it with.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was known for blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, and that is exactly what he does in this story. It was written in 1954 and first appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction. In the chronology of his works, it came between Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan.

The story takes place in a future in which the population has grown so huge, due to an anti-aging product, that generations are forced to live together in crowded apartments. The family in this story is ruled by a dictatorial grandfather, the owner of the apartment and oldest of the clan.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. himself reads from his most celebrated works: Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and three complete stories from Welcome to the Monkey House.

Kurt Vonnegut The first and only collection of unpublished works by Kurt Vonnegut since his death - a fitting tribute to the author, and an essential contribution to the discussion of war, peace, and humanity's tendency toward violence.

Kurt Vonnegut Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow portrays a massively overpopulated America, where six generations of the Schwartz family live together in a one-bedroom apartment. Great-Great-Grandpa rules the roost from the master bedroom until someone tries to dilute his Antigerisone. Adapted for audio by Yuri Rasovsky, with a cast featuring Tom Poston, Hamilton Camp, Marilyn Mercer, Ira Burton, Laura Kellogg, and Phil Proctor.Hosted by award-winning writer and broadcast personality Harlan Ellison.

Kurt Vonnegut Bluebeard, published in 1987, is Vonnegut's meditation on art, artists, surrealism, and disaster.

Meet Rabo Karabekian, a moderately successful surrealist painter who we meet late in life and see struggling (like all of Vonnegut's key characters) with the dregs of unresolved pain and the consequences of brutality. Loosely based on the legend of Bluebeard (best realized in Bela Bartok's one-act opera), the novel follows Karabekian through the last events in his life, which are heavy with women, painting, artistic ambition, artistic fraudulence, and as of yet unknown consequence. Vonnegut's intention here is not so much satirical (although the contemporary art scene would be easy enough to deconstruct), nor is it documentary (although Karabekian does carry elements of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko). Instead Vonnegut is using art for the same purpose he used science fiction clichés in Slaughterhouse-Five: as a filter through which he can illuminate the savagery, cruelty, and essentially comic misdirection of human existence.

Listeners will recognize familiar Vonnegut character types and archetypes as they drift in and out through the background; meanwhile Karabekian, betrayed and betrayer, sinks through a bottomless haze of recollection. Like most of Vonnegut's late works, this is both science fiction and cruel, contemporary realism at once, using science fiction as metaphor for human damage as well as failure to perceive.

Listeners will find that Vonnegut's protagonists can never really clarify for us whether they are ultimately unwitting victims or simple barbarians, leaving it up to the listener to determine in which genre this audiobook really fits, if any at all.

Kurt Vonnegut According to Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego, the old science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, a global timequake will occur on February 13, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. It will be the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience: Should it go on expanding indefinitely or collapse and make another great big BANG? For its own cosmic reasons, it decides to back up a decade to 1991, giving the world a 10-year case of deja vu, making everybody and everything do exactly what they'd done during the past decade - for good or ill - a second time.

As a character in and a brilliant chronicler of this bizarre event, Kurt Vonnegut casts his wicked wit and his unique perspective on life as he's lived it and observed it for more than 70 years.

Kurt Vonnegut American literary icon Kurt Vonnegut enjoys immense popularity - and an equally immense amount of critical praise - for such works as his absurdist classic
Slaughterhouse-Five. A must-have for readers everywhere,
Look at the Birdie adds further insight into the author's body of work with a riveting collection of his previously unpublished short fiction.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut made his mark as one of America’s most influential writers with novels such as Slaughterhouse Five, named one of the 100 best English-language novels by Time. Published posthumously, While Mortals Sleep is a collection of 16 short stories, written early in Vonnegut’s career, that further cements his status as an American literary icon.

Kurt Vonnegut I had an uncle who left his hometown and the family business there to become a fine actor. His talent was a minor one, but a pretty one. It lasted for 15 years and was gone. He came home with the ashes of it and died 20 years later, poor and, as it happened, drunk.

Previously unpublished, brilliant and deeply personal, Sinbad is Kurt Vonnegut's story of a young man who decides, against the wishes of his family, to leave home to pursue life as a painter. The result is a picaresque as bizarre and imaginative as any of Vonnegut's most beloved stories.

Kurt Vonnegut In the 1950s and early 1960s, before television reigned preeminent, Kurt Vonnegut's short stories appeared frequently in popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and Argosy. Filled with unforgettable characters, humor, and satire, these stories offer a rare glimpse into a developing master of fiction. Vonnegut himself selected the very best of his early stories for this audio release, and he reads the preface and the afterword. Collection includes: "Thanasphere," "Souvenir," "Bagombo Snuff Box," "The Boy Who Hated Girls," "Lovers Anonymous," and eight other miniature masterpieces.

Kurt Vonnegut Eugene Debs Hartke (named after the famous early 20th century Socialist working class leader) describes an odyssey from college professor to prison inmate to prison warden back again to prisoner in another of Vonnegut's bitter satirical explorations of how and where (and why) the American dream begins to die. Employing his characteristic narrative device - a retrospective diary in which the protagonist retraces his life at its end, a desperate and disconnected series of events here in Hocus Pocus show Vonnegut with his mask off and his rhetorical devices unshielded.

Debs (and Vonnegut) see academia just as imprisoning as the corrupt penal system and they regard politics as the furnishing and marketing of lies. Debs, already disillusioned by circumstance, quickly tracks his way toward resignation and then fury. As warden and prisoner, Debs (and the reader) come to understand that the roles are interchangeable; as a professor jailed for "radical" statements in the classroom reported by a reactionary student, he comes to see the folly of all regulation.

The "hocus pocus" of the novel's title does not describe only the jolting reversals and seemingly motiveless circumstance which attend Debs' disillusion and suffering, but also describe the political, social, and economic system of a country built upon can't, and upon the franchising of lies. At 68, Vonnegut had not only abandoned the sentiment and cracked optimism manifest in Slaughterhouse-Five, he had abandoned any belief in the system or faith for its recovery. This novel is another in a long series of farewells to the farmland funeral rites of childhood.

Kurt Vonnegut Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey", this 20,000-word novella was never published in Vonnegut’s lifetime. It appears (from the address on the manuscript, a suburb of Schenectady, New York, and from the style and slant) to have been written in the late 1940s. Vonnegut was working at that time in public relations for General Electric and used pseudonyms to protect himself from the charge of moonlighting. He was trying to sell to the so-called slick magazines of the time, like The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, while resisting the lure of science fiction - a tension throughout his professional career.

Basic Training is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood, and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley’s only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General’s deranged (but oh so American, oh so military) values. This story and its thirtyish author were no friends of the milieu to which the slick magazines’ advertisers were pitching their products.

Another unexpected writer’s influence underlies this story: J.D. Salinger. Throughout the ’40s and before his move to New York, Salinger had produced short stories whose confused or slightly deranged young protagonists (most of them around the age of Haley Brandon) stumbled through pre- and postwar Manhattan and military service, experiencing mild disaffection, alienation, and then terrible anger. All of them came to learn that the people who ran the show were as crazy and dangerous as those nominally on the other side. Shortly after these semi-whimsical social portraits were published, Salinger, like Vonnegut, was drafted, shipped into combat and involved in the Battle of the Bulge.

In this audio edition, performed for the first time by Colin Hanks (Band of Brothers, Orange County), exist not only Vonnegut’s influences and what later became his voice but Vonnegut’s grand themes: trust no one, trust nothing; the only constants are absurdity and resignation, which themselves cannot protect us from the void but might divert.

Kurt Vonnegut Deadeye Dick is Kurt Vonnegut's funny, chillingly satirical look at the death of innocence. Amid a true Vonnegutian host of horrors - a double murder, a fatal dose of radioactivity, a decapitation, an annihilation of a city by a neutron bomb - Rudy Waltz, aka Deadeye Dick, takes us along on a zany search for absolution and happiness. Here is a tale of crime and punishment that makes us rethink what we believe...and who we say we are.

Kurt Vonnegut Perhaps the most autobiographical (and deliberately least disciplined) of Vonnegut's novels, Slapstick (1976) is in the form of a broken family odyssey and is surely a demonstration of its eponymous title. The story centers on brother and sister twins, children of Wilbur Swain, who are in sympathetic and (possibly) telepathic communication and who represent Vonnegut's relationship with his own sister who died young of cancer almost two decades before the book's publication. Vonnegut dedicated this to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Like their films and routines, this novel is an exercise in non-sequentiality and in the bizarre while using those devices to expose larger and terrible truths. The twins exemplify to Swain a kind of universal love; he campaigns for it while troops of technologically miniaturized Chinese are launched upon America. Love and carnage intersect in a novel contrived to combine credibility and common observation; critics could sense Vonnegut deliberately flouting narrative constraint or imperative in an attempt to destroy the very idea of the novel he was writing.

Slapstick becomes both product and commentary, event and self-criticism; an early and influential example of contemporary "metafiction". Vonnegut's tragic life - like the tragic lives of Laurel, Hardy, Buster Keaten and other exemplars of slapstick comedy - is the true center of a work whose cynicism overlays a trustfulness and sense of loss which are perhaps deeper and truer than expressed in any of Vonnegut's earlier or later works. Slapstick is a clear demonstration of the profound alliance of comedy and tragedy which, when Vonnegut is working close to his true sensibility, become indistinguishable.

Kurt Vonnegut Available to listeners for the first time, Sucker’s Portfolio showcases a collection of seven never-before-published works from Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Short, sardonic, and dark, these six brief fiction stories and one non-fiction piece are consummate Vonnegut with piercing satire and an eye for life’s obscene inanity. Also available for the first time is an unfinished science-fiction short story, included in the appendix.

These stories trace trivial human lives and mundane desires, which is precisely where Vonnegut’s inimitable perspective as a humanist shines, illuminating his alternating hopeful and dismal outlook, although undoubtedly focusing on the latter. Here as in his greatest novels, Vonnegut’s writing takes us to the darkest corners of the human soul and with wit and humor, manages to remind us of our potential to be something greater.

Kurt Vonnegut Called "our finest black-humorist" by The Atlantic Monthly, Kurt Vonnegut was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Now his first and last works come together for the first time in print, in a collection aptly titled after his famous phrase, We Are What We Pretend To Be.

Written to be sold under the pseudonym of "Mark Harvey," Basic Training was never published in Vonnegut's lifetime. It appears to have been written in the late 1940s and is therefore Vonnegut's first ever novella. It is a bitter, profoundly disenchanted story that satirizes the military, authoritarianism, gender relationships, parenthood, and most of the assumed mid-century myths of the family. Haley Brandon, the adolescent protagonist, comes to the farm of his relative, the old crazy who insists upon being called The General, to learn to be a straight-shooting American. Haley's only means of survival will lead him to unflagging defiance of the General's deranged (but oh so American, oh so military) values. This story and its 30ish author were no friends of the milieu to which the slick magazines' advertisers were pitching their products.

When Vonnegut passed away in 2007, he left his last novel unfinished. Entitled If God Were Alive Today, this last work is a brutal satire on societal ignorance and carefree denial of the world's major problems. Protagonist Gil Berman is a middle-aged college lecturer and self-declared stand-up comedian who enjoys cracking jokes in front of a college audience while societal dependence on fossil fuels has led to the apocalypse. Described by Vonnegut as, "the stand-up comedian on Doomsday," Gil is a character formed from Vonnegut's own rich experiences living in a reality Vonnegut himself considered inevitable.

Along with the two works of fiction, Vonnegut's daughter, Nanette shares reminiscences about her father and commentary on these two works - both exclusive to t...

Kurt Vonnegut Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans, of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). In that sense, Starbuck is a generic Vonnegut protagonist, an individual compromised by the essential lack of an interior.

Jailbird (1979) uses the format of the memoir to retrospectively trace Starbuck's uneven, centerless, and purposeless odyssey in or out of the offices of power. He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend. Written in the aftermath of Watergate, Jailbird is, of course, an attempt to order those catastrophic events and to find some rationale or meaningful outcome, and, as is usually the case with Vonnegut's pyrotechnics, there is no easy answer, or perhaps there is no answer at all.

Starbuck (his name an Americanized version of his long, foreign birth name), in his profound ambiguity and ambivalence, may himself constitute an explanation for Watergate, a series of whose consequences have not, decades later, been fully assimilated or understood. The Nixon who passes across the panorama of Jailbird is no more or less ambiguous than Starbuck himself - a man without qualities whose overwhelming quality is one of imposition.

Robert A. Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut & Ray Bradbury "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door."

A new crop of writers emerged from the dawning of the nuclear age, grappling with humankind's place in the universe. While imagining the wonders of space exploration and the rise of technological advancements, they questioned whether we were prepared to encounter aliens, or even control the machines and weapons we'd built ourselves.

These first episodes of the Dimension X series - including stories by Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Bloch, and Robert Heinlein - feature performances by Staats Cotsworth, Raymond Edward Johnson, Les Damon, Bill Lipton, Berry Kroeger, Jan Miner, Joan Alexander, and more.

Kurt Vonnegut Narrator Glenn Hascall is great with humor, and there is indeed humor in this Kurt Vonnegut short story. Where he takes us is to 2158 A.D, where Old Gramps Ford and his sizeable family are all cooped together in their ramshackle Alden Village home, with Gramps regularly cutting members of the family who misbehave out of his last will and testament. The reason the family is so sizable is an anti-aging drug was discovered and widely distributed when Gramps was 75 years old, and it is now 102 years later, and the family is still breeding, with nobody dying off. Eventually things become quite crowded. A solution however is to send Gramps on a big trip up yonder by making his anti-aging medicine disappear. Good luck with that!

Kurt Vonnegut In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut presents in Fates Worse than Death a veritable cornucopia of his thoughts on what could perhaps best be summed up as "anti-theology", a manifesto for atheism that details Vonnegut's drift from conventional religion, even a tract evidencing belief in the divine held within each individual self--the deity within each individual person present in a universe that otherwise lacks any real order. Vonnegut was never a real optimist, and with just cause: he had an incredibly difficult life (he had been a prisoner of war, from which he drew the title for his book Slaughterhouse-Five) and suffered from failing health, which only showed him his own mortality even more than he already knew it. Still, most readers find that in the body of Vonnegut's work there is a glimmer of desperate hope. Vonnegut's continued search for meaning surely counts for a great deal as he balances hope and despair. Scholars and fans can read about Vonnegut's experiences during World War II and the after effect he felt it had on him. His religious (or antireligious) ramblings and notations are interesting and, by turns, funny and perceptive. The humor may be dark, but that does not make it any the less funny.

For adventure fans of all ages, these stories are guaranteed to intrigue, delight, and sometimes take you by surprise!

Give them a try, and don't be surprised if a few of them make their way onto your list of all-time personal favorites!

Kurt Vonnegut A chilling and famous short story by Vonnegut, published in 1962. The title refers to the telephone number one dials to schedule an assisted suicide with the Federal Bureau of Termination. The setting is a society in which aging has been cured, individuals have indefinite lifespans, and population control is used to limit the population of the United States to 40 million. This is maintained through a combination of infanticide and government-assisted suicide. In short, in order for someone to be born, someone must first volunteer to die. As a result, births are few and far between, and deaths occur primarily by accident.

Kurt Vonnegut This collection of Kurt Vonnegut's most rare and unexamined essays, speeches, fiction, and interviews offers fascinating insight into the mind of the iconic science fiction author and intellectual.

With cutting wit, fierce conviction, and surprising empathy, Vonnegut explores a diverse range of topics including society, politics, sex, literature, and mortality. Fans who believe they've read all of Vonnegut's work will be delighted to find the author speaking frankly about timely and relevant new topics - with an amusing yet insightful style that's instantly recognizable.

Kurt Vonnegut The corridor of the Fine Arts Building was deserted, save for two figures at the far end, two men approaching slowly. Rose was about to go into the classroom, where she'd left her purse, when she saw a sign on the door - a crude sign in pencil, on a ragged sheet of paper. "Collapse of Western Civilization - Dr. Norbert Beilstein," it said. "Visitors welcome."

Previously unpublished, Slice of Life - about a college coed's winter-induced dream - is an early testament to Kurt Vonnegut's original voice and curious imagination.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut takes us sometime in the future, where old age has been conquered and it's a perfect society. Almost. When old age has been conquered, you can imagine the problem with population. How do you resolve that? Population control! Someone comes in, someone goes out. There is even a number to call for voluntary termination, 2BR02B. How clever: "to be or not to be" from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Kurt Vonnegut What if there were a product that taken daily and barring an untimely accident or murder allowed one to live indefinitely? In Kurt Vonnegut Jr's fanciful tale, that is just what happens. At first the miracle product Anti-gerasone seems like a blessing. But what if the population keeps breeding? How to make room for the new ones. And then there is the problem of the curmudgeon who doesn't get the stuff until he's in his late 70s becomes head of the family and is still going strong 104 years later.

Narrated by award winning narrator Mike Vendetti, this Kurt Vonnegut tale is an enjoyable listen on the way home.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) was a prolific and genre-bending American novelist known for works blending satire, black comedy, and science fiction, such as Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Cat's Cradle (1963), and Breakfast of Champions (1973).

These two short works, "The Big Trip Up Yonder" and "2BR02B", are science fiction tales originally published in the magazines Galaxy Science Fiction and If: Worlds of Science Fiction in 1959 and 1962.

Kurt Vonnegut Kurt Vonnegut was a groundbreaking American writer, the author of such classics as Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle.

In a future where sickness and disease are a forgotten memory, and death itself has been cured, population control requires special consideration, and the concept of "life for life" has a new definition.